Tank of bioCO2 produced by the Carboliq process for a greenhouse farmer in Saint-Philbert-de-Grand-Lieu, photo by Frédéric Douard
Haytham Sayah, photo CryoCollect
CryoCollect is a startup founded in 2017 by Haytham Sayah and Philippe Khairallah. The company now has six employees, including three engineers and doctors in energy and processes from the École des Mines de Paris. The company’s mission is to develop innovative solutions in the energy sector (purification, liquefaction, etc.) to reduce environmental impacts and to carry out process engineering on innovative projects.
Two industrial firsts achieved in France
In the field of biogas, CryoCollect has already implemented two processes under industrial conditions:
- A liquefaction process for the biomethane project led by MéthaBraye in the Loir-et-Cher department. This process reduces the volume of the gas by 600 times. Biomethane produced far from the network can thus be transported in tanks to consumer sites or to the network itself.
- A purification and liquefaction process for the low-grade gas resulting from biomethane purification at Méthatreil in the Loire Atlantique department, to produce food-grade liquid CO2 (EIGA standard).
CO2 recovery and purification installation at MéthaTreil in Machecoul, photo by VerdeMobil
A third micro-liquefaction process for natural gas for vehicles is also under development.
The first BioCO2 unit in France
The development of this purification process took five years of research and benefited from the expertise of the CES (Centre for Energy Efficiency of Systems) at the École des Mines de Paris in thermodynamics and process engineering.
The principle is to recover CO2 from biogas purification and, instead of releasing it into the atmosphere, purify it to valorize it as renewable CO2, substituting fossil CO2 used in numerous industrial applications.
The bioCO2 produced by MéthaTreil is used in greenhouses in Saint-Philbert-de-Grand-Lieu, photo by Frédéric Douard
For the industrialization of the solution, CryoCollect relied on Verdemobil Biogaz, which today constructs the equipment and markets it in the French market.
The Carboliq process
To produce food-grade CO2, it must be extracted from the low-grade gas coming out of biomethane purifiers, knowing that impurity tolerance levels are extremely low. To achieve this, the Carboliq process combines a series of operations that separate the undesirable components from the CO2 one by one.
In the first phase, the low-grade gas is compressed to 20 bar. From there, it is dehydrated by absorption filters. The extraction of volatile organic compounds proceeds in two steps: low-temperature condensation followed by washing.
The Carboliq process
In the second phase, the gas is liquefied by significantly lowering the temperature, causing the downward flow of carbon dioxide, the heaviest element. At the top of the process, in a gaseous sky, residual methane and nitrogen are recovered and sent back to the biomethane purification chain. Thus, CH4 loss is zero, knowing that there can be 0.7 to 3% methane remaining in the low-grade gas. At the bottom of the process, the quality of the CO2 is continuously measured, and when the values are correct, it is extracted in liquid form and stored in a tank.
Contacts : contact@cryocollect.com – contact@verdemobil.com – www.verdemobil-biogaz.fr
Frédéric Douard